We're not sure if anyone really wants to visit Australia right now, what with the fires and all, but it's certainly seldom been a better time to buy fares. United is still offering no advance purchase peak season fares to Sydney. From LA, for example, you'll pay just $808 round trip including tax. We usually see this price point for off peak travel with advance purchase restrictions, and indeed if you surf over to Qantas.com, which was matching this United sale for a while, you'll see that their off peak fares for travel May 1 to September 21, with a last purchase date of February 27, are much higher.

V Australia is also having a sale to Australia from LA for travel beginning March 21, with nonstop flights in both economy and premium economy. They're adding new nonstop flights from LA to Brisbane and Melbourne later this year. We tried booking flights on their Web site, and maybe it's just because we use Macs or it was a temporary thing, but we couldn't get anywhere (each time we tried to do a search, it brought us immediately to Virgin Blue's site, which is not where we wanted to go).